


A Place Like This

by spycaptain



Category: Naruto
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Is there actually a ship tho? Is there?, Post-War, the ship isn't the point but i'm tagging it just to be safe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 02:55:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17236025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spycaptain/pseuds/spycaptain
Summary: Now she heads into things she doesn’t want to think about. Things folded up neatly and tucked away. Small deaths that she buried so deep she can sometimes forget what they did to her in the first place.





	A Place Like This

**Author's Note:**

> I literally pull titles out of my ass from somewhere in the text.

Anko spends her time after the war between hobbies. Hobbies being eating, drinking, pissing, and shitting, whatever it is she can fit into her extremely packed hospital stay. Very important stuff for a very important kunoichi like herself. **  
**

She’s amused (and driven crazy by) the fact that this is the most free time she’s had in years. And look, she’s got a bed by the window, lucky girl that she is. It’s the perfect scenario for her to reflect on all the stupid, fucked up things she’s done in her life.

It’s not like she has much else to do with her time. Iruka is busy enough that he can’t always visit. She’s on chakra blockers and sedatives to stop herself from trying to mold chakra, because she’s the kind of belligerent shithead that will push herself to the point of destruction if not actively restrained from doing so. The universe has seen fit to leave her alone with her thoughts, and since she’s never seen a gamble so set against her, she’s not even going to take the bet. She’s going to finally let herself sit and think.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes she tries to remember Yamato when he was young. It’s hard, her memories from that time all seem so foggy, like her brain was so busy trying to teach her how to put one foot in front of the other again that it forgot to remember anything she experienced.

But she thinks she knows what he was like back then. A scrawny, shy thing, right before puberty hit him like a truck and turned him into the man she knows now. There was his longer hair and his softer voice and the weird feeling in her stomach that she was standing next to someone who a harsh breeze could tear apart.

He doesn’t act like that now. She’s seen him snap the neck of a child soldier about to turn on them, seen him do things without hesitation that would have left her sick in her head for weeks. Sometime between the fragile frame and the harsh breeze, _he_ grew up, and whatever spark of something _more_ she thought she saw finally died.

She wonders what that dead thing inside him is doing at a time like this. If she has enough time to unbury unkind things, she knows he must as well. She wants to know what the first thing he decided to unearth was. What it will be. Anko wants to sit beside him and turn a little key in the back of his head, open his skull right open, and watch as that brain of his scurries through traumas and lost lives.

The first time Anko met him, he was balancing on a line he didn’t understand. She wants to know if he understands it now. If he’d go back and change anything if he had the chance.

Anko remembers a girl with long brown hair walking a crooked, crazy line, and the little boy that landed when she fell right off it.

 

* * *

 

Now she heads into things she doesn’t want to think about. Things folded up neatly and tucked away. Small deaths that she buried so deep she can sometimes forget what they did to her in the first place.

Sometimes the smell of rain reminds her of him, because it was raining when she realized something was wrong. It was the final, fleeting moment where she was able to humor the thought that she still had him, before reality snapped it away. Rain and the smell of cigarettes from her neighbor next door, an old woman who would smoke and talk to her when both their windows were open - those are the strange, disconnected things she associates him with now. It’s been so long and so loud she doesn’t think she can remember anything else. Shisui is forever the memory of the water stain on her ceiling, the sound of an old, wet cough, and smoke that Anko can smell and also barely see on the edges of her vision. He’s the crushing weight of the moment she realized she was right.

There’s nothing when she tries to think back. It’s like it didn’t happen.

Because Anko had no place in finding the answers when he was gone. And there was so much silence surrounding him. His clan. Itachi. She felt the violent swell of change raise up all around them long before the massacre happened. It was in the name that was caught on her tongue, the name she couldn’t say, the name that became so heavy it got stuck in her throat and made her choke.

Back then she had been used to her home being empty, but there had been days and nights when it was not, when he spent his time with her and she felt relief, and to have such an simple, easy joy disappear…

She blinks back tears.

She began writing her thoughts after that. If it weren’t for his name in those early pages, Anko would buy the lie that he had never existed. They had never existed.

 

* * *

 

It’s easier to move now. Her fingers and toes and arms and legs and all the important parts of her. It’s not that she couldn’t before, but everything felt so foreign, so empty and light that every step felt like her moment to fall of the edges surrounding her. But she’s good now. She’s getting good.

She dreamt one night she was with him again. Her sensei. Flat on one of his exam tables, held down, and he was there with her like he used to be. Except this time she knew what they really were. He was above her, examining her, feeling for all the parts of her that were crackled and split open. She was the specimen. The thing being examined. Just another notch in his belt of ideas. But at least time it was honest. This time she could scream.

She woke up with red in her mouth and arms heavy like lead. She skipped her chakra blocker that next day, and the day after, tongued the little pills and spit them into the trash, and on the third day she tried to prove him wrong. Her skin was on fire, a series of snaps before the loud and violent pop, the chakra pathway in her left hand completely blown out.

But she was right. She did the right thing. Her sensei didn’t come to her in her dreams again. She’d done it – made herself defective and uninteresting and all by herself.

 

* * *

 

It’s all so stupid and senseless.

She has a roommate who cries when the medics talk to her. Anko is quiet and pretends not to notice. And she’s quiet later that night when she watches her rummage through the cabinets and drawers.

“They’re not dumb,” she says. “They’re not going to leave anything here that you can off yourself with.”

There are too many bodies above and below her. Too many souls for a place like this.


End file.
